He still hesitated, looking first at me and then at a bottle he carried
in his hand. Finally he resolved to make a clean breast of it.

"Why," he said, "I didn't expect to find a woman here, least of all _une
chatelaine_. It rather startled me! You see, I've got into the habit
of coming round towards dawn. The boys begin to get chilly about that
time, and are glad enough to have a go at my fruit brandy. They say I'm
too old to mount guard, so I must serve my country as best I can. Will
you have some--my own brew?"

I declined, but he was not offended; yet he seemed reluctant to go.

"Sit down," I said. "It won't belong before some of the men will be
passing by on their way to the fields, and then you won't have made your
journey for nothing."

Pere Potipard gladly accepted, and after a generous swig at his brandy,
began telling me about what happened at Villiers during the German
invasion in 1870. As he talked on, night gradually disappeared, and when
the clock in the belfry tolled three A. M. my successors came to relieve
me. I blew out the lantern and walked home in broad daylight.

The boys looked very sheepish when they learned what had happened, but
as I did not boast of my exploit, merely taking it as a matter of
course, they had no way of approaching the subject, and like many other
things of the kind, it was soon forgotten in the pursuing of our
onerous daily tasks, and the moral anxiety we were experiencing.

There seemed to be no end to the fruit season that summer. The lengthy